About this episode
This episode discusses the film M3GAN, its production, and its cultural impact.
The final episode of AIpril, M3GAN arrived in January 2023 as a modest Blumhouse horror release, and promptly became one of the most talked-about horror comedies of the year. On a budget of $12 million, it grossed over $180 million worldwide, spawned a franchise, and put a ten-second hallway dance sequence into the permanent vocabulary of internet culture. Director Gerard Johnstone insisted from the outset on a practical-effects-first approach, and supervising puppeteer Adrien Morot built a suite of six or seven animatronic puppets capable of different ranges of movement — some with articulated eyes and heads, others with fully computerised motion control. The defining creative rule was simple: animatronic when still, performer when moving. That performer was Amie Donald, a ten-year-old New Zealand national dance champion and brown belt in karate, who wore a static silicone mask on set that was later replaced in post-production with a digitally animated face by Wētā Workshop. The result is a character who occupies the uncanny valley not as a technical failure but as a deliberate aesthetic strategy; M3GAN is unsettling precisely because you can never quite be sure what you're…
People in this episode
Host: Verbal Diorama
Topics covered
- horror
- comedy
- film production
- animatronics
- internet culture
Keywords
- M3GAN
- horror comedy
- animatronics
- Gerard Johnstone
- TikTok
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Wētā Workshop, Universal
Products: M3GAN
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